Thanks to the Wellcome Trust it is available open access. Following changing scientific understandings of dementia, the book also demonstrates how cultural expressions of the experience and dementia have fed back into the way medical institutions have treated dementia patients. It tries to understand to what extent the current cultural dementia narrative (a narrative of loss, decline, dependence and passivity) is grounded in historical scientific and medical language related to brain diseases, beginning with its origins in the nineteenth century, when the condition was first described as an organic disease, to the present day, when it is viewed as a disorder of cognition. My second monograph, The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2020), charts changing cultural understandings of dementia and specifically Alzheimer’s disease in scientific and literary texts across the twentieth century. The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (2020)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |